Tuesday, July 10, 2007

When festivals attack

It's always a little disappointing when a trip to the downtown festival is substantially less fun than, say, a trip to the post office. Or the doctor. Or crazy Auntie Lucy's trailer home with her 15 smelly cats and homemade peanut brittle.
Yes, it's another edition of "We are awesome parents."
The family and I decided to check out the Sugar Creek Art Festival in downtown (recently renamed, for whatever reason, uptown) Normal. It has a lot of nice stuff. Art stuff, but also music and festival food and at least one guy who photoshops the heads of dogs on people. But here's the first problem: It's roughly 115 degrees in central Illinois in July and our kids are Pig Pen-esque.
So when I took the bike, parked it too far away from where we set up shop, went back to get it and finally reconnected with the family, I knew deep down that we had erred in judgement.
In the meantime, Steve was bombarded on all sides with families choosing to stand directly between him and the band, which was about half a football field away, a grandpa feeding his group to a round of ice cream cones and little kids delving into their endless candy supply.
And to top it all off, Penelope lost her balloon right before we left and cried all the way home. All two-miles, 115-degrees of it.
Sometimes I think, "Man. Look at all these families having an great time at this thing. What is our problem?" I believe our failure to see an SUV with mega-air as a viable solution is a beginning to understanding the slightly sticky, extremely sweaty approach to child rearing we have come to love.
That and we just can't say no to festival food. Bad festival food. Bad.

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